Category: Blag

So, I decided to kill two birds with one stone (metaphysically), and try out some blog software and Drupal’s BlogAPI and the Windows Live Writer software and see the results.  Sooo…. this is what comes of it.  Hope you enjoy (and that it turns out right…).

So, this weekend felt like I did absolutely nothing (either that, or it went by extremely friggin’ fast).  On Friday night, I went over to Jason’s (known in some circles as Nofirefrog) house, and made a tournament bracket, surfed the Internet, and did some stuff on Xbox Live.  The tournament bracket was for the Third Annual MHS Quiz Bowl Invitational Tournament, which I helped with on Saturday.  Unfortunately, I was assigned duty as the scorekeeper for Ms. Oates, who, for those of you who don’t know, is pretty much the most insane teacher in all of Arkansas.  Throughout the matches she would randomly damn math and science, mispronounce words terribly (though that’s not a big surprise), pull out a magical faerie wand (complete with light and sound), and whack me on the back of the head.  Yep, fun times.

However, over the weekend, I did reformat my laptop’s hard drive, clean out the crap that got in my laptop through the fan inputs (more on this later), and re-install Windows XP, and install Ubuntu (more on this, as well).  First, the dust.  It’s amazing how much dust a laptop can collect in a period of roughly six months.  I got a can of compressed air, and used it to clean out the dissipaters on the heatsink, and it was crazy how much dust came out.  Next, I grabbed the vacuum and stuck it over the input grates, and it was almost sickening how much clobs of dirt came out of that thing.  No wonder my laptop had been overheating so easily lately.  I was really gross.  After a combination of the compressed air, the vacuum, and some tweezers, I finally got it all clean, and boy, does it run much cooler now.

Now, onto Ubuntu.  As I said, I got it on my laptop, but I’ve run into a few problems.  The first is that my touchpad’s scrolling feature doesn’t work (as in, I can’t scroll my finger on the right and bottom of the touchpad to scroll text, or whatever in a window).  Next, my wireless suddenly crapped out, and third, and most depressing, I can’t get my ATI card to load the correct drivers.  The first time, I installed the open source driver, but it still loaded the default one.  Then, I tried the ones from ATI.  This turned out even worse, as now no video loads after the boot screen. ;_;  So, if any of you readers happen to know of a way to solve any of these problems, please point me in the right direction in a comment or something.  (I suppose it may be useful to say that my laptop is a Toshiba Satellite A75-S1253)

In other Linux news, on my desktop,I got Xubuntu running with Beryl running, and boy is it sweet!  For those of you who have no idea what that meant, check out this video:

Pretty sweet, eh?  I submit that it is.  And Linux runs sooo much faster with XFCE (the window manager Xubuntu is based on) than Gnome (the window manager the stock Ubuntu runs on).  It’s a win-win situation, especially since I like XFCE as well as I like Gnome (I don’t like KDE, for the record).

 

So, really, I guess I did more than I thought I did, but it just felt like it wasn’t much.

Well, I think that’s about enough rambling on for one entry.  Hope you enjoy, and I hope that Windows Live Writer submits the story to Drupal correctly.  I will be sure to have a copy saved in the clipboard, just in case, though.

EDIT: OK, it’s probably a good thing that I saved a copy of my entry, because Window Live Writer + Drupal != good. It was posted as one single paragraph and none of the links worked. Fortunately, WLW has an option to view the raw HTML, and I could copy that into a new story in Drupl, and set the input format to full HTML, and it works fine. The source is crap-ass ugly, but only I will ever know that. I think from now on, I’ll stick to the regular HTML submission form for my blog entries.

Shit… I just realized I have to “get up” for class in 5 hours… that sucks.

OK, so really, I meant to have this update on Thanksgiving, but circumstances (which should become apparent as you read this update) caused me to have to delay my readers another juicy update. So, without further ado, I present: Thanksgiving: The Update.

So, TG, that wonderful time of the year where you get together with your family and enjoy a fine meal of Turkey an dressing (or if you’re weird, lobster) and maybe watch some football (that would be of the American variety).

That’s pretty much how my TG was, except for one tiny little change in the plot: I was sick. And I’m not talking about the runny nose-only sick. I’m talking about the full-blown headache, runny nose, sore-coughing throat, man-it-really-sucks sick. And it wasn’t just one day of the break. It started about Monday evening, but didn’t really pick up until about Tuesday night — just in time for the TG Holiday, I might add. It lasted the entire break (even now, I’m not feeling 100%). So my break = suck.

So, if any of my family members from my mom’s side of the family gets sick, I’m sorry (we went and ate there on TG, we had already had TG with my dad’s side last Sunday, as I suppose that’s the only time we could all get together). If I had the choice, I would have not been sick on TG, thus causing you to get my infections.

Then, the second major cause of my delays occurred, and that was the moving the blog to a more semi-permanent home, which you are currently viewing. I did some extra tweaks to this version, and I must say, it really turned out how I wanted it. I was mainly looking for a way to have a WordPress-like way of perma-links, so instead of having http://galador.eastforums.com/node/1 , it is now something like http://galador.eastforums.com/archive/2006/nov/26-another-new-blog-sheesh . Longer? Sure, but now you can see my posts by year or month, and I think those kind of perma-links look much nicer.

So, I apologize for the delay, but I think it cause my blog to come out even better than ever. And I actually did an update, so you can’t really complain all that much.

As a side note, I think I’m going to change my major. (The world exclusive announcement, right here on mah blog!) I’ve been thinking about it over the break, and programming is just not for me. I thought it would be fun, but I just don’t enjoy it. I can do it, but I get no sense of accomplishment in it. Not like I do than, say, setting up a new OS or a new server, and it finally working how I like it. So, based on my thoughts (scary huh?), I believe I’ m going to change my major to Computer Information Systems.

To tell the truth, that’s probably what I should have started out doing, but either I didn’t realize that it was offered here or (more likely), I just didn’t think about the possibility of doing it. I thought that Computer Science was going to be the way for me, but it turned out that that was not the case. I think programming would be something I would want to do on my own time, not something that I would be forced to do when my company has a new client with X features and Y days to do it in. That kind of pressure is not for me.

So there you have it folks. Not only an update, but a world-exclusive announcement straight from the horse’s mouth. Enjoy that food for though, and hopefully it won’t give you any indigestion.